Lockheed Martin Unveils High-security USB Drive

Defense company Lockheed Martin usually focuses on building advanced aircraft, missiles, and bits of spacecraft. This makes their newest venture all the more baffling. Lockheed Martin is partnering with IronKey to deliver a line of super secure USB thumb drives. The so called “IronClad” USB keys will apparently come with a custom software package you won’t find anywhere else.

IronKey flash drives have been available for some time using 256-bit AES encryption along with an additional layer of 128-bit AES hardware encryption. Details on how the Lockheed Martin version will differ are a bit nebulous right now, but it will reportedly include IronKey encryption, built-in virus protection, at least 8GB of storage, and security oriented network applications. No pricing is available yet, but considering that a regular 8GB IronKey goes for around $150, we can probably assume this won’t be an impulse buy.

Comments

Obviously, this is a blog post for informative reasons only about a new hardware option. Not an in depth review. Having said that, meangenedrlove has some excellent points here and is probably either in the military and frustrated by our lack of transportable storage options, or he's a contractor with the same frustrations.

This memory storage solution makes a LOT of sense when you're dealing with gov't entities.

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Baffling? Hardly. The DoD currently has a ban on thumbdrives and other USB mass storage hardware because of the unsecure nature of most of them...not to mention they are manufactured in China and other countries that would love to have back-door access to our defense systems. It makes sense that Lockheed-Martin would make a DoD friendly/approved thumbdrive as GSA is sure to pick it up while all other brands remain banned from DoD use.

With the DoD budget cuts and the reduction/cancellation of the F-22 and other high-dollar weapon systems, LMCO still needs to make money to stay in the game. If companies don't adapt to changing demands they go out of business. The idea to develop this type of hardware is nothing short of genius on LMCO's part. I would expect to see more of this type of technology from defense-centric companies. Government contracts + consumer sales = $more than I can count!

How do they handle the memory? Rewritten on the fly? Is the host booted with the stick? Or is the entire OS goes through a network layer? If used through the host OS, is the USB volume mounted? How to they handle the keyboard on a potentially compromised host?